Dreams Were Here Before Us, Before Meanings, Are Meaningless, Don’t Need Us in Saint George, Utah, 13 December 2018

If memories are angels, messengers, dreams
Are more the other sort of demons, the imps,
The fallen that never had far to fall, were never
Children of the morning stars, the children of night
That squat on your chest, shadows in the dark.
Dreams borrow words, have no words of their own.
Dreams have nothing to do with us. Still, they come,
An old dispensation in our mammalian brains
From the wordless generations before interpretation,
Before stories or versification. The value
They may have once had for the body inhabited
Gets in the way of the value the body now has for us.
For us, for languages, dreams are the indigenes
With poison-tipped arrows in the deep woods. . . .
No, earlier, much. Dreams are the long-toothed
Predators and shambling, shaggy megafaunal prey
That once dominated the ecology of the preverbal
Mind. Then we came. We ate them, drove them away.
But unlike the real megafauna, more like the myths,
Those beasts we invented ourselves, cryptozooids
Of monstrous dimensions, dragons, giants,
And snowmen, dreams come back again. Morning
And streamers of rose light passed over desert skies.
We had another dream last night, a young mother
Who reversed course before our eyes, bringing
A fair-haired toddler to an evening seminar
We taught as her toddler transformed silently,
So unlike a toddler, into an infant, then a pregnancy,
And then the mother asked us to place a hand
On her stomach to feel the kicking, before
We helped her out to her car in the parking lot
In the dark where she was no longer a mother
Only desirous of becoming one. At this, we woke
And scrambled to assemble ourselves for the hunt,
Which was this poem, which we have won,
Although the dream, for all our netted phrases
Still escaped us, meant nothing beyond us, fled
Back to the forest from which nonmeanings come.